
Manuel TrajtenbergTel Aviv University | TAU · School of Economics
Manuel Trajtenberg
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Publications (87)
By using survey data on a large sample of European patents, we estimate the determinants of a composite indicator of patent value that summarizes information from many indirect indicators commonly employed by the literature. The elasticity of man-months on the value of one patent is small, 4%, while that on the number of patents in the portfolio of...
This paper is an exploratory empirical study of the mobility of software inventors, which uniquely utilizes patent data for that purpose. Mobility of inventors is often associated with knowledge spillovers. Consequently, there is a potentially significant bi-directional link between mobility of inventors and property rights protection. The study of...
The informational structure of R&D is characterized by the fact that firms are exposed to more information related to R&D successes of their competitors than to one that reveals their failures. This paper theoretically explores the feasibility of trading knowledge of R&D failures. The implications of constructing a market for R&D failures are subst...
This paper was prepared for the LAEBA 2005 second annual meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is meant to provide a framework for thinking systematically about innovation policies for development, without venturing into specific, recipe-like policy recommendations. It does so by identifying and dissecting the key issues that arise in this context...
The contribution to growth from the steam engine-Industrial Revolution icon and prime example of a "General Purpose Technology"-has remained unclear. This article examines the role that a particular design improvement in steam power, embodied in the Corliss engine, played in the growth of the U.S. economy in the late nineteenth century. Using detai...
The Europe and Central Asia (ECA) Knowledge Economy Study aims to offer ECA policy makers options to increase and maintain productivity and growth by creating an environment conducive to the application of knowledge in the economy via innovation and learning. The tradition of excellence in learning and basic research in several ECA countries provid...
A volume of scholarly papers addressing the future of the university for the entrepreneurial age, presented at the 2008 Kauffman-Planck Summit on Entrepreneurship Research and Policy held June 8-11, 2008, in Bavaria, Germany.
Productivity growth in virtually all west European countries exceeded that of the United States throughout the period 1950 to 1995. Since then American productivity performance has strengthened and that of the EU has weakened. The most important reason is contrasting experiences with Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The article argu...
The National Bureau of Economic Research patent database is a research-friendly compilation of U.S. patent data, with geocoding of information on inventors and assignees, codification of inventor and assignee names, and patent citations. Download the slides at: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper=1027953 Download the audio file at: http://papers.ssrn.com/...
The goal of this paper is to lay out a methodology and corresponding computer algorithms, that allow us to extract the detailed data on inventors contained in patents, and harness it for economic research. Patent data has long been used in empirical research in economics, and yet the information on the identity (i.e. the names and location) of the...
This paper analyzes the terrorist threat following 9/11, and explores its implications for defense R&D. First, it reviews the composition of defense R&D since 9/11: big weapon systems still command 30% of defense R&D spending (legacy of the Cold War), vis-a-vis just about 13% for intelligence and anti-terrorism. The second part examines the nature...
We explore the usefulness of patent citations as a measure of the "importance" of a firm's patents, as indicated by the stock market valuation of the firm's intangible stock of knowledge. Using patents and citations for 1963--1995, we estimate Tobin's q equations on the ratios of R&D to assets stocks, patents to R&D, and citations to patents. We fi...
This paper asks the question: Can we see evidence of General Purpose Technologies in patent data? Using data on three million US patents granted between 1967 and 1999, and their citations received between 1975 and 2002, we construct a number of measures of GPTs, including generality, number of citations, and patent class growth, for patents themsel...
The contribution to growth from the steam engine Industrial Revolution icon and prime example of a General Purpose Technology has remained unclear. This article examines the role that a particular design improvement in steam power, embodied in the Corliss engine, played in the growth of the U.S. economy in the late nineteenth century. Using detaile...
This paper seeks to analyze the nature of the terrorist threat following September 11, 2001, and to explore the implications for defense R&D policy. First, it reviews the defining trends of defense R&D since the Cold War and brings in pertinent empirical evidence. During the 1990s, the United States accumulated a defense R&D stock ten times larger...
This paper addresses three questions: (i) Are multinational firms (MNCs) really better than markets at transferring knowledge across borders? (ii) How actively do MNCs exchange knowledge with their host countries? (iii) Do they contribute as much to local knowledge as they learn from their host countries? To answer these questions, I analyze data o...
This paper seeks to analyze the nature of the terrorist threat following 9/11, and to explore the implications for defense R&D policy. First it reviews the defining trends of defense R&D since the cold war, and brings in pertinent empirical evidence: The US accumulated during the 1990s a defense R&D stock 10 times larger than any other country, and...
In Europe and in Japan, patent applications are automatically published at 18 months from the filing date regardless of whether a patent has been or will ever be granted. In the U.S., applicants who file for a patent only in the U.S. can choose to keep their applications confidential until a patent is actually granted. We examine the consequences o...
I investigate market penetration strategies adopted by Israeli firms that trade in technology with American firms. The choice strategy is modeled as a two-stage process. A firm first decides between forming a subsidiary or an alliance. Conditional on forming an alliance, the firm selects a partner. I find that established firms tend to form their o...
Knowledge flows within and across countries should be carriers of important learning spillovers. We use data on 1.5 million patents and 4.5 million citations to analyze knowledge flows across 147 sub-national regions. We estimate that only 15% of average knowledge is learned outside the average region of origin, and only 9% outside the country of o...
I consider an upstream supplier that supplies an input to an independent downstream firm and in addition sells the final product to consumers. I find that the upstream supplier cannot implement the monopoly outcome without imposing maximum resale price maintenance (RPM). RPM increases social welfare if consumers' valuation for the final product of...
Strong seasonality in demand, a short product life cycle, and the absence of any price competition make the release date of first-run movies one of the main strategic decisions taken by movies' distributors. These endogenous timing decisions, in turn, generate a strong seasonal pattern of release dates. Therefore, the observed seasonal pattern of s...
Innovation and technological change, long recognized as the main drivers of long-term economic growth, are elusive notions that are difficult to conceptualize and even harder to measure in a consistent, systematic way. This book demonstrates the usefulness of patents and citations data as a window on the process of technological change and as a pow...
Abstract Canada has been lagging in terms ,of productivity ,growth ,in recent ,years. A possible cause might be poor performance,in R&D and technical change. This paper is an attempt toshed light on this issue, by examining innovation in Canada for the past 30 years with the aid of highly detailed patent data. I use for that purpose all Canadian pa...
Abstract—This paper explores the recent explosion in university patenting as a source of insight into the changing,relationship between,the university and the private sector. Before the mid-1980s, university patents were more highly cited, and were cited by more diverse patents, than a random sample of all patents. More,recently several significant...
The steam engine is widely regarded as the icon of the Industrial Revolution and a prime example of a ‘General Purpose Technology,’ and yet its contribution to growth is far from transparent. This Paper examines the role that a particular innovative design in steam power, the Corliss engine, played in the intertwined processes of industrialization...
This paper describes the database on U.S. patents that we have developed over the past decade, with the goal of making it widely accessible for research. We present main trends in U. S. patenting over the last 30 years, including a variety of original measures constructed with citation data, such as backward and forward citation lags, indices of 'o...
The steam engine is widely regarded as the icon of the Industrial Revolution and a prime example of a 'General Purpose Technology,' and yet its contribution to growth is far from transparent. This paper examines the role that a particular innovative design in steam power, the Corliss engine, played in the intertwined processes of industrialization...
As patent data become more available in machine-readable form, an increasing number of researchers have begun to use measures based on patents and their citations as indicators of technological output and information flow. This paper explores the economic meaning of these citation-based patent measures using the financial market valuation of the fi...
Productivity growth in virtually all west European countries exceeded that of the United States throughout the period 1950 to 1995. Since then American productivity performance has strengthened and that of the EU has weakened. The most important reason is contrasting experiences with Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The article argu...
The steam engine is widely regarded as the icon of the Industrial Revolution and a prime example of a “General Purpose Technology,” and yet its contribution to growth is far from transparent. This paper examines the role that a particular innovative design in steam power, the Corliss engine, played in the intertwined processes of industrialization...
The high tech sector in Israel has turned in the course of the last decade into a striking economic success story, both by
local and by international standards. In fact, Israel stands as one of the most prolific innovating economies, and as one
of the few Silicon Valley types of technology centers in the world. There is no doubt that government pol...
Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips stock price has been predicted using the difference between core and headline CPI in the United States. Linear trends in the CPI difference allow accurate prediction of the prices at a five to ten-year horizon.
Following the approach suggested by Favero and Rovelli (2002), I estimate a three-equations system for different sub-samples for Canada. The results indicate that the preferences of the monetary authority have changed between the different regimes. In particular, the parameter associated to the implicit target of inflation has been reduced signific...
The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of R&D policy in Israel, and critically examine the policies currently in place as well as proposals to change them. We review in Part I the various programs of the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) of the Ministry of Industry and Trade in Israel, followed by a discussion of studies on the impact o...
A survey of recent patentees was conducted to elicit their perceptions regarding the importance of their inventions, the extent of their communication with other inventors, and the relationship of both importance and communication to observed patent citations. A cohort of 1993 patentees were asked specifically about 2 patents that they had cited, a...
This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...
This paper studies the consequences of physician authority on pharmaceutical prescribing. Physicians engage in a costly process of particular conditions and characteristics. The relative efficiency of this matching process results from the diagnostic skill of the physician along with the investments made by the doctor in learning about different dr...
In this paper, we consider a three-stage game in the context of a competing exporters model to compare and contrast the effects of discriminatory and uniform (Most Favored Nation, MFN) tariffs on countries' choice over environmental standards for varying degrees of pollution spillovers. Because of the presence of punishment effects and stronger own...
This paper explores the patterns of citations among patents taken out by inventors in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and Japan. We find (1) patents assigned to the same firm are more likely to cite each other, and come sooner than other citations; (2) patents in the same patent class are approximately 100 times as likely to cite each other as...
This paper explores the recent explosion in university patenting as a source of insight into the changing relationship between the university and the private sector. Before the mid-1980s, university patents were more highly cited, and were cited by more diverse patents, than a random sample of all patents. More recently several significant shifts i...
This paper explores the patterns of citations among patents taken out by inventors in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and Japan. We find that, (1) Patets assigned to the same firm are more likely to cit each other, and come sooner that other citations; (2) patents in the same patent class are approximately 100 times as likely to cite each other...
This paper studies the consequences of physician authority on pharmaceutical prescribing. Physicians engage in a costly process of "matching" patients to the drug which most suits their particular conditions and characteristics.
Modern economies are characterized by a significant division of labor in the production of scientific and technical advance. In broad generalization, universities, other non-profit institutes and government laboratories pursue fundamental scientific and engineering research with little expectation of immediate commercial result. In contrast, privat...
This paper is an attempt to quantify key aspects of innovations, 'basicness' and appropriability, and explore the linkages between them. We rely on detailed patent data. particularly on patent citations, thus awarding the proposed measures a very wide coverage. Relying on the prior that universities perform more basic research than corporations, we...
The extent to which new technological knowledge flows across institutional and national boundaries is a question of great importance for public policy and the modeling of economic growth. In this paper we develop a model of the process generating subsequent citations to patents as a lens for viewing knowledge diffusion. We find that the probability...
This paper evaluates the sources of transitory market power in the market for personal computers (PCs) during the late 1980's. Our analysis is motivated by the coexistence of low entry barriers into the PC industry and high rates of innovative investment by a small number of PC manufacturers. We attempt to understand these phenomena by measuring th...
This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...
We push the span of hedonic price calculations for automobiles backwards towards the industry's birth. Most of the real change that occurred between 1906 and 1982 occurred between 1906 and 1940. During these years, hedonic prices fell at an average annual rate of 5%. The pace was brisker still during the first 8-12 years. Our measured declines can...
Whole eras of technical progress and growth appear to be driven by a few 'General Purpose Technologies' (GPT's), such as the steam engine, the electric motor, and semiconductors. GPT's are characterized by pervasiveness, inherent potential for technical improvements, and 'innovational complementarities', giving rise to increasing returns-to-scale....
We evaluate the sources of transitory market power in personal computers in the late 1980s to explain how high rates of imitative entry coexisted with high rates of innovative investment, We measure the impact of different principles of differentiation (PDs); each PD reflects a distinct notion of product similarity offering a potential source of ma...
In this paper we estimate the price premium associated with organic baby food by applying a hedonic model to price and characteristic data for baby food products collected in two cities: Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina and San Jose, California. We use price per jar of baby food as the dependent variable and control for a number of baby food characte...
Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips stock price has been predicted using the difference between core and headline CPI in the United States. Linear trends in the CPI difference allow accurate prediction of the prices at a five to ten-year horizon.
We compare the geographic location of patent citations with that of the cited patents, as evidence of the extent to which
knowledge spillovers are geographically localized. We find that citations to domestic patents are more likely to be domestic,
and more likely to come from the same state and SMSA as the cited patents, compared with a “control fr...
We explore the use of patent citations to measure the "basicness" and appropriability of inventions. We propose that the basicness of research underlying an invention can be characterized by the nature of the previous patents cited by an invention; that the basicness of research outcomes relates to the subsequent patents that cite an invention; and...
This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inel...
The use of patents in economic research has been seriously hindered by the fact that patents vary enormously in their importance or value, and hence, simple patent counts cannot be informative about innovative output. The purpose of this article is to put forward patent counts weighted by citations as indicators of the value of innovations, thereby...
The goal of this paper is to address the problem of 'product innovations' (i.e. new goods. increased variety, and quality change) in the construction of price indices and, by extension, in the measurement of economic performance. The premise is that a great deal of technical progress takes the form of product innovations, but conventional economic...
This paper puts forward a methodology for the measurement of product innovations using a value metric, that is, equating the "magnitude" of innovations with the welfare gains they generate. This research design is applied to the case of computed tomography scanners, a revolutionary innovation in medical technology. The econometric procedure centers...
Studies of diffusion have traditionally relied on specific distributions-primarily the logistic- to characterize and estimate those processes.We argue here that such approach gives rise to serious problems of comparability and interpretation, and may result in large biases inthe estimates of the parameters of interest. We propose instead the Gini's...
Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...
The main goal of this paper is to put forward a methodology for the measurement of product innovations using a value metric, i.e., equating the "magnitude" of innovations with the welfare gains that they generate. This research design is applied to the case of Computed Tomography (CT) Scanners, a revolutionary innovation in medical technology. The...
Previous studies of the imaging performance of computed tomography (CT) scanners, and other imaging modalities, have failed to apply appropriate statistical methods to data analysis, thus impairing the accuracy and significance of results. Given that imaging performance involves a number of interrelated variables and an element of randomness, its e...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1984. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 441-449). Microfiche. s